Crab Apple Jelly

My partner and I have been gathering crab apples recently - those grape-sized (or sometimes larger) bright red mini-apples you see this time of year. (Fun fact: they happen to be the only apple variety indigenous to North America). We live in a neighborhood with quite a few crab apple trees, some very old, so our forager tendencies took over and we spent an afternoon walking around sampling the fruit of various trees, like some urban and slightly demented version of the biblical Eve. I found a vintage recipe for crab apple jelly, which appealed to the thrifty old lady who lives somewhere inside me, because after you make the jelly you then use the leftover pulp to make crab apple butter. It also appealed to me because the recipe was winsomely titled "What To Do With a Peck of Crab Apples." Full disclosure: I had to Google "peck" to figure out that it's the measurement equivalent of two dry gallons.

Along with Xuxu, we picked at least that much. That peck is sitting in our refrigerator right now, waiting to be jellied, because with a brand new baby daughter I haven't exactly made it to that part yet. Which is why, at a recent local farmer's market, I literally started salivating over one vendor's beautifully canned pear harlequin.

It was so pretty in the half-pint mason jar that I almost bought it. Until I remembered that a) I didn't have the money for it and b) I still had all those crab apples I'd committed to putting up.

We've been having a pretty hard time lately, not just financially but emotionally. I won't go into details, but it's been pretty rough. And no, I'm not going to turn this crab apple jelly story into some wonderful mommy blog article about how adversity teaches you stuff, or difficulties build character. Because it's too easy to read that kind of inspirational crap everywhere you go. Because that's not how I roll. And because as a fellow I rode the bus with a few weeks ago put it: "You can't grow flowers in battery acid."

Being satisfied with my own crab apple jelly, and forgoing the beautiful and no doubt delicious pear harlequin is really just an extension of what I'm trying to do with the rest of my life right now: work with what I have. It's not a new concept, not after living off the grid in the country for the last four years, and after a lifetime of poverty, It's just something that seems alien to a lot of folks I encounter, and to the American mindset in general. Don't have it? Buy it. Why make it when you can buy it? Why notice what's right in front of you when you can buy something else? Something that's supposedly better?

Really, though, re-attuning my mind to this way of living is teaching me some new things. Things I hadn't really assumed I needed to learn. New adventures in canning, for sure. Saving and pinching every available penny, certainly. But I'm also learning all over again how I'm surrounded by generous, amazing, loving friends. How mutual support requires emotional openness. How raising your children means being flexible with time, money and your heart.

And patience. It's in baby steps, but yes. Quick-tempered, loudmouth, little ole me is learning how to wait, how to hold my tongue, and how some things don't need to be said. They just don't. I knew this. I just wasn't sure how to do it in real life.

Some of these lessons are as recent as today. Most of them will continue being learned over a lifetime. All of these lessons learned are going into my parenting toolbox, my own little mental compartment I examine whenever I am covered in my infant's spit up and Xuxu is screaming at me to wipe her daggan and I'm exhausted and stressed because goddamnit I need some coffee after getting 2 hours of sleep.

That parenting toolbox is my life toolbox , too. I'm never going to arrive at a place where I have all the answers. I''m never going to be able to walk this path alone. And I'm not ever going to not feel hurt at the way the world works, at the way people can let you down. But I can deal with it.  I can move ahead. I can eat my crab apple jelly on my homemade bread and be satisfied, because I have enough. I am full. I am content because I used what I had, and I have some truly wonderful things in my life.

Why Xuxu is Learning to Speak Chamoru

My daughter recently visited her great-grandmother, my grandma. Xuxu loves these visits. She loves asking questions, telling Nana about her day, and playing with the few toys that are still left at my grandma's house. And during this particular visit, Xuxu decided to try out some newly learned Chamoru words during an animated conversation. My grandmother, laughing, decided that Xuxu was talking gibberish.

That's when I interjected and explained that no, Xuxu is speaking a legit language. She's learning Chamoru along with her dad, who's learning from older native speakers and teaching himself. At this point she knows more Chamoru words and phrases than I can recognize.

My grandma, who grew up poor and white in a north Idaho mining town, couldn't make much sense of this. And a lot of other people can't seem to, either. Why would you teach a kid who talks white, who regularly passes for white, a language that is currently experiencing a cultural resurgence but that is largely only spoken on a handful of Pacific islands that Xuxu's never even been to?

I'm starting to feel more capable of explaining why we want Xuxu to learn her dad's native language. At first it was tough. Here I am, obviously white mama to a little girl with caramel colored hair, blue-green eyes and tan skin. One who's speaking English with no accent, but mixing it with unknown words in a foreign language. I understand why people squint at me, get a little perturbed. Am I one of those parents, trying to claim something that isn't mine? Or is my kid one of those overachievers who's learning multiple languages before preschool? Am I one of those multicultural appreciation parents, who's trying to inundate my kid with other's stories and languages just because I want her to grow up to be culturally sensitive? There's plenty of parents like this in liberal-leaning Washington State; I just don't quite fit the visual stereotype. Uff da, as my older Scandinavian relatives were known to say.

So, it's no, no, and no. Xuxu is learning Chamoru because Xuxu is Chamoru - more commonly spelled Chamorro, although this spelling is the Spanish interpretation of an indigenous word. Chamorro are the native peoples (in Chamoru, Taotao Haya) of the Marianas Islands, the most well-known of these being Saipan and Guam. My partner's family is from Guam, and although his immediate family has lived stateside for the last 20 years, they have not lost their connection to their islands.

It's a connection my partner hopes our daughter - and our soon-to-arrive second child - will feel. Culturally, Xuxu is Chamorro. She is learning and sharing in traditions, language and values. While I hope she also appreciates and shares in my cultural background, I wasn't raised with a distinct set of cultural ties. The closest thing I had was a strong relationship with my Swedish great-grandmother. Unlike me, Xuxu is part of a large extended family that is tied together by common culture, what one could term a sense of tribal unity. She's been included in that world since her very first day. If she hadn't been, I might hesitate to call her Chamorro, although that's certainly a large chunk of her genetic makeup. She's more Pacific Islander than I am Norwegian and Swedish, which I like to claim when I'm feeling weirdly nostalgic for something I don't have. Maybe it's my own response to feeling culturally void.

But Xuxu is growing up with strong cultural identifiers. She is learning more than words, more than food and fiestas. She is learning about ties to an ecosystem and a community, about values that connect her to her grandparents and great-grandparents and their experiences learning and growing on an island first brutally colonized by the Spanish, then governed as a colony by the United States. Connections not only to those grandparents, but to ancestors long deceased who spoke some of the same words, danced some of the same dances, heard and told some of the same stories. Xuxu is participating in a centuries-old cultural tradition that is currently being restored and reclaimed by Chamorro people across the Marianas and North America. And Xuxu's white mom is excited for her.